The Lord's Second Temptation

The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him.  For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test and grasp.  To think like that is to make oneself God.  And to do that is to abase not only God, but the world and oneself, too.

From this scene on the pinnacle of the Temple, though, we can look out and see the cross.  Christ did not cast himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple.  He did not leap into the abyss.  He did not tempt God.  But he did descend into the abyss of death, into the night of abandonment, and into the desolation of the defenceless.  He ventured this leap as an act of God's love for men.  And so he knew that, ultimately, when he leaped he could only fall into the kindly hands of the Father.

This brings to light the real meaning of Psalm 91, which has to do with the right to the ultimate and unlimited trust of which the Psalm speaks: If you follow the will of God, you know that in spite of all the terrible things that happen to you, you will never lose a final refuge.  You know that the foundation of the world is love, so that even when no human being can or will help you, you may go on, trusting in the One who loves you.  Yet this trust, which we cultivate on the authority of Scripture and at the invitation of the risen Lord, is something quite different from the reckless defiance of God that would make God our servant.